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SEO Rundown Sept. 23

Theo from Mountain Media here again for another episode of SEO Rundown. Today’s topics; Yelp or how I stopped worrying and learned to love other review aggregators, Google stops following its own webmaster practices briefly, and an update on P3.0.

How I learned to stop worrying and love other Review Aggregators

First off, Yelp, the recent Supreme Court ruling that Yelp has the right to make you pay for your positive reviews is a clear signal that you should be considering other review aggregators than the pay-for-play bully in the local review yard. While Yelp is the catch-all for reviews there are many other review websites out there that are gaining traction and show that Yelp isn’t the only major player when it comes to rep management and local SEO. If you are any sort of restaurant or hotel there is TripAdvisor, Urbanspoon, Google Places, Google+,Facebook, Twitter, Bing Local, and local town and city websites who love, love, love to showcase their local businesses. Which will give you a nice juicy backlink for SERPs local and organic.

I know, at this point you’re saying, “But Theo, I’m not a restaurant or a hotel, I have to use Yelp or else I won’t have any sort of human reviews.” To that I say, use Angie’s List in addition to the search engine products and social media sites I just listed, Angie’s List is a great spot to be on because all of the users are paid subscribers so you have a gated review community. While Yelp is getting front page SERPs, Angie’s List is close behind them and if there is a community shift away from Yelp, they will be forced to change their practices or go out of business. Also, Angie’s List is a great way to gain high-end leads for your business as they put you front and center within their search. Plus, it’s free for businesses. If you don’t want to go the Angie’s List route; Facebook is great for reviews and while you will have to deal with some spammy reviews, again, no anonymous reviews.

Google Black Hat for a Day, Update on Penguin 3.0

Next, while this isn’t really trending I did find it comedic and somewhat ironic, Google decided to go black hat for a day and started indexing its own search results. While it was a mistake and was quickly fixed it is funny that even the Great G sometimes makes mistakes in its robots.txt file. Speaking of the Big G, Google has released an update that Penguin 3.0 will most likely be run in 2014. What that means to me, is that they might be waiting until right before the holiday season to run it. Which means it could be a present in some stockings and coal in others, make sure it’s a present for you and your clients and run those link audits folks. I know I spoke about this last time, but this is the SEO boogeybird we are talking about. Make sure your backlinks are squeaky clean folks, if you have even a shadow of a doubt then Run. Those. Audits. If you are a business owner and need some help, give us a call over at Mountain Media, we are here to help you.

Well that’s it for this week folks, as last time, if you liked what you saw, subscribe to our YouTube Channel, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.